Tuesday night, Betsy and I finished our first set of projects. She made a drawstring bag (from this tutorial) for her knitting projects and I knitted a dishrag that turned out relatively nicely. Not too bad for our first attempts! 🙂
Isn’t that bird adorable?
This week is Nik’s Spring Break and Ellie and I are enjoying having him at home with us! Rather than go on a longer vacation, we’re having a few mini-adventures around Baltimore. Our first was on Monday night. We took a picnic supper to Fort McHenry, home of the battle that inspired Francis Scott Key to write our national anthem.
Fort McHenry is one of my favorite places in Baltimore.
Fort McHenry was somewhere that kept me sane in my first few months of living in Baltimore. It was the one place where I could look for long distances, restful for the eyes of this Alaska girl who was used to gazing at far-away mountains.
Just as we had spread out our dinner, the park ranger came by to tell us that the park was closing in 15 minutes. Thankfully, we’d noticed that there was a city park nearby so we relocated our picnic there. After dinner, Ellie was thrilled to visit the playground as she is currently a huge fan of slides and swings.
She is also a big fan of driving the car.
Our last appointment of the evening (and what prompted us to go to Locust Point in the first place) was a visit to the showroom of Sandtown Millworks.
They salvage wood from buildings that are being demolished (or rehabbed) in Baltimore City and turn that wood into beautiful furniture. We’ve been searching for a dining room table for a long time (at least three years) and we’re so glad to have finally found the right place and people to buy one from!
Our table will probably look similar to this display one.
I think Nik should become their official photographer.
Isn’t that an impressive picture?
All in all, a fun evening and a great start to Spring Break!
On Saturday, Ed (my favorite farmer at the farmers’ market) had asparagus. He apparently had even had it the week before. That’s a pretty solid three weeks early. I only buy asparagus from Ed and when he doesn’t have it any more, well then, we don’t eat it anymore until the next year. I was thrilled to see this first vegetable of spring! Even though it wasn’t on the menu plan, here’s what we’re eating tomorrow night.
Pasta with Asparagus, Toasted Almonds, and Browned Butter
from Cooks Illustrated, March/April 2003
2 T oil
1 pound asparagus, in 1-inch lengths
3 large garlic cloves, sliced thin
2 medium shallots, sliced into rings
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
Heat the oil until really hot. Add the asparagus and cook, without stirring, for 1 minute until it begins to brown. Add the garlic, shallots, salt, and pepper and cook until asparagus is tender crisp, another 3-4 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and set aside.
6 T butter, cut into pieces
1 C chopped almonds (The recipe calls for sliced almonds. I prefer to use whole almonds and chop them myself. I like the texture provided by the different sizes of almond pieces and the “almond dust” that is created by the chopping adheres really nicely to the pasta and distributes the almond flavor better.)
1/4 C sherry vinegar (I never have sherry vinegar around so I use apple cider instead)
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme (which I don’t always have – it’s OK to omit it but delicious if you do have it)
Add the butter to the hot skillet, on high heat. After the butter melts, add the almonds and cook, stirring constantly until the almonds and butter are browned and irresistible, 1-2 minutes. Off the heat, add the vinegar and thyme. Stir the asparagus mixture back in.
1 pound of pasta (having been cooked in water with 1 T of salt) (CI recommends farfalle, I usually use rotini)
1 C grated Parmesan cheese (we usually use kefalotiri, a Greek cheese)
Stir the butter/almond/asparagus mixture into the pasta, along with 1/2 C of the cheese. Serve immediately with the remaining 1/2 C cheese for sprinkling on top. Delicious!
(The cooking of this recipe goes very quickly so I would recommend having everything chopped and ready to go before starting the cooking process. Usually, I can cook the butter/asparagus mixture in the time that it takes the pasta to cook. It is also worth the trouble to slice the garlic thinly rather than using a garlic press. The garlic slices are delicious.)
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Our other favorite way to eat asparagus is shaved asparagus pizza. We’ll probably eat that this week too!
Hooray for spring!
On Thursday, Ellie turned 18 months old!
To celebrate, we joined our friends at the zoo. OK, not really specifically to celebrate, but it was a fun way to spend the day anyway!
We started off by having fun looking at the crazy vultures. My friend and I decided we can understand why they’ve ended up being bad guys in so many Disney movies.
The faces with no feathers are a bit freaky.
While at the zoo and looking at the tortoises, we met a little boy who was almost 18-months old. While I wasn’t looking, he gave Ellie a hug. She just looked at him and then burst into tears. Good work Ellie! That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do when a boy tries to touch you! 🙂
Ellie and A having fun together.
That afternoon, we had Ellie’s 18-month well-baby checkup. One of the questions our doctor asked me was if Ellie was enjoying being with other kids, particularly those who are a little bit older than her. I was able to give her an emphatic “Yes!”. She loves being with her friends! And Sharla and I had a great time watching our little girls together!
Here’s Ellie telling A where she wants to go. I guess she knows her own mind, even at 18 months!
And for those inquiring minds who want to know, Ellie is currently 23 pounds, 12 ounces and 32.5 inches long.
My friend and former roommate, Betsy, and I have a good deal going. I’m teaching her how to sew and she’s teaching me how to knit! So last night, I got my first lesson. I learned how to cast-on (although I’ve pretty much forgotten how to do that already) and how to do the knit stitch. That one I practiced again this morning and I still remember. Now I want to knit all the time! It’s totally awesome. And I want to learn how to make socks. But I’m told socks are tricky. So I’d probably just better finish my dishrag first! 🙂
Ellie is truly helping me these days, in many ways.
She loves to empty the silverware rack in the dishwasher. She hands me each piece individually, says, “Na-win” (her happy sound!), and goes back for the next one.
She helps clear the table after dinner.
She puts her dirty clothes in the hamper.
She absolutely adores going down to the basement to do laundry with me. When we wash the diapers, she always carries the covers upstairs (the covers in her arms while she is in my arms).
Today, she brought them up, put them in the recliner, and then happily played with them for several minutes while I was doing other things – again, helping Mama!
To any moms (or aunties or anyone else with experience with kids) who reading this – how do you encourage your kids to help you? What jobs have you found that they can do, even when they’re this little? I want to keep this good thing going!
This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short. If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on. I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.
This is Part 3d. Here’s Part 3a,, Part 3b, and Part 3c with more of my thoughts on this subject.
Here are some final thoughts on the topic of natural childbirth. I’ve been thinking in theological terms about this the past few days so here’s my thoughts (from an non-theologian!).
The issue of women’s bodies being created to give birth vs. women’s bodies being broken by the Fall and therefore not easily able to give birth seems to be something that is brought up quite a bit. This was mentioned in a comment on my first post on this topic as well as I read it more recently on this blog post*.
Both my friend who commented and the author of that other post pointed out that although women’s bodies were created for giving birth, we also live in a world affected by sin and therefore, we should expect complications to occur. So therefore, most likely, many medical interventions are necessarily and even good because things are going to go wrong.
Yes, I would agree 100% that human bodies (men and women) don’t always work the way we were created to work because of the Fall. And yes, I should have mentioned that in my original post. I apologize for neglecting part of the natural childbirth story by doing that.
BUT…here is my struggle with emphasizing the Fall: In doing so, we forget about creation. We forget that although our bodies are 100% affected by sin, we are also 100% created in the image of God. The field of medicine (although not in religious terms) does this with pregnancy and childbirth. Pregnancy and childbirth are medicalized. What happens when women go in for a prenatal checkup? The very first thing we have to do is pee in a cup to see if we have something wrong with our urine, even if we have no indications that there might be anything wrong. What happens when a women first enters the hospital to give birth? She has to be hooked up to a fetal monitor, get an IV put in, and all kinds of other stuff that assumes that something will go wrong even if she’s totally healthy and neither she nor her baby have any signs of distress.
I haven’t felt the need to emphasize the “things can go wrong” side of the equation because the field of medicine does such a good job of it already. Why didn’t I read What to Expect When You’re Expecting when I was pregnant? It was because I had too many friends who read it and then were terrified throughout their whole pregnancy that one of the sixty million terrible things they’d read about were going to happen to their baby.
Why didn’t I talk about the brokenness aspect of women’s bodies with childbirth in my first post? I don’t see the necessity of reminding women that something might go wrong. We all know this! We’re reminded of this every time we go to the doctor! What we forget is that God also created our bodies perfectly for giving birth. The medical literature is clear that there is a perfectly-designed system in a woman’s body for giving birth. This doesn’t mean that things will go right every time. However, we forget that more often than not, IF women are given the support and freedom that they need to labor well, births go relatively smoothly.
Please do not read in this post an opposition to medicine. I am not advocating that we throw out all medicine and go back to 200 years ago. I know the good that medicine has done, that far too many women used to die in childbirth. I am not saying that all medicine is bad. What I am saying is that too much medicine is bad. Medicine when we don’t need it is bad. There is a difference between intervening when something is going wrong and intervening when everything is fine.
In the end, we need a balanced approach to pregnancy and childbirth, theologically as well as medically: created but fallen, perfectly designed but flawed. It’s a hard balance to find.
Any theologians out there with any thoughts on this issue? It’s been a long time since I studied the “creation, fall, redemption, restoration” ideas so I’m sure what I’ve written here can be improved!
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*I hesitate to even link to that blog post because the post is such a mix of valid points and [what I think is] misinformation. But in the interest of keeping this honest, there it is. I’m not going to write a whole blog post about it (although I could) but here are my thoughts in short. On the negative side: I’m not entirely in agreement with her interpretation of the curse in relation to pain in childbirth; she quotes anecdotal evidence from doctors and labor and delivery nurses to prove that having an epidural is better and safer than natural childbirth, ignoring the empirical, peer-reviewed, published research which shows the opposite; and she neglects to acknowledge that women’s bodies are under physical stress when giving birth, regardless of if they have an epidural or not. On the positive side: I very much appreciate her reminder that each birth is different; that we need to trust God with all parts of our lives; that we need to be graceful in our interactions with each other, particularly on this issue; and that ultimately, this is not a spiritual issue.
Ellie is growing up so quickly. All of a sudden, she really loves playing with other kids. Yesterday, our friend P came over to spend a couple hours with us while her mom went to an appointment. Ellie and P had so much fun together!
First, they compared belly buttons:
Then, they sat on our crib mattress, which is only used for storing pillows and blankets these days.
Then, they drank water together, very proud of getting to use real cups! We only had to use two towels for clean-up! 🙂
They also managed to scatter toys throughout the house. This I did not mind though because their playing allowed me to made bread and bagels!
Hooray for friends!
This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short. If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on. I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.
This is Part 3c. Here’s Part 3a, Part 3b , and Part 3d with more of my thoughts on this subject.
Thanks to many of you who have commented on this topic, both on the blog and by talking to me in person. Through that feedback along with another blog post I’ve come across recently, I think there are more issues to touch on with this subject, which is why I’m revisiting it today (and will write at least more more post about the topic).
I wrote a disclaimer when I started this blog series because I wanted all my readers to understand my heart in writing these posts. Specifically, I wrote:
I know that you are trying to do the very best for you and your loved ones. I know that we all have hard decisions to make every day about how we spend our time and our money. I know that every person is different and we may look at the same issue with the same information and still make two very different choices.
That’s OK.
My intent in writing this series is to put some information out there. If it helps you, great! If it piques your interest or gets you going on changing something that you’ve been wanting to change, great! If you think, “Wow, that is weird and I would never do that,” great!
I link to this disclaimer at the beginning of every post and remind readers to read it if they haven’t already. None-the-less, I think I need to specifically say a few things related to childbirth.
1. I do not EVER look at a woman who chose to have an epidural with scorn or derision in my heart. I usually don’t know the entire birth story. I don’t know why she chose an epidural. Honestly, I usually just hope that she was given the support and information she needed to make an informed decision about whether or not to have an epidural. And then I want to hear all about and hold her baby!!
2. I most certainly do not consider myself more spiritual because I delivered a baby naturally. We did what we knew to be the right thing for us but I do not presume to know what is right for every other family. I’m frankly frustrated and saddened to hear that some women feel looked down upon because they chose to have an epidural. Why do we do that to each other? We mothers are not in a race to outshine each other with how strong/tough/amazing we are.
3. That does not mean, however, that I think that advocacy is a negative thing. Natural/unmedicated childbirth is a GOOD thing. It’s something that needs to be championed. We cannot hold back from advocating for what we believe to be the best because we’re afraid of hurting the feelings of those who have chosen another way. If we do so, we risk never speaking out and risk the good being lost.
It is indeed a hard tightrope to walk between wanting to be considerate of others’ feelings on the one hand and on the other, knowing that it’s important to speak the truth.
Salmon and Souvlaki 